


the right of winter

by Losha



Category: Bleach
Genre: Angst, Family Feels, Frostbite, Gen, Hypothermia, I mean most of the main cast are dead so...., Is it bad to kill a main character when in canon you know where they end up?, Personification of Nature, Personification of Winter, Post-Winter War (Bleach), Powerlessness, Supernatural Elements, Supernatural Illnesses, Whumptober, Whumptober 2018, author is a shameless Valente fan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-27 03:58:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16210937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Losha/pseuds/Losha
Summary: “It is the right of winter to take, to make bereft, to steal away in the night’s freeze.” - Catherynne ValenteIchigo sacrificed his powers and parts of his soul to produce the Final Getsuga Tenshou, to throw everything he had at Aizen to make sure he was defeated. When the power flowed out - Winter flowed in.





	the right of winter

He does not regret it.

Ichigo checks himself every night to be sure, asks that question of himself and seeks honest answers, all so he can say in his final letters: I do not regret it.

It won’t be enough for them, but Ichigo hopes even now to relieve his family, friends, and shinigami allies of the guilt that may spread with news of his death. He doesn’t want them to feel guilty. He doesn’t want them to blame themselves for not noticing or preventing what’s coming for him.

There is no stopping what is coming. Winter can be weakened but never truly stopped and Death will always find a way. It’s fine. Ichigo has had time to come to terms with his mortality.

A year of ice in his veins. A year of an unshakable chill. A year of aches and pains in each and every bone. His nostrils dry and dripping blood, his breath riding a fog. Ichigo can fight a lot of things, but he cannot fight this. It is almost as if when he released the Final Getsuga Tenshou, he opened a doorway to other things; reiatsu poured out - and the winter flowed in.

Ichigo has carried the bite of Winter in himself for a year now, a poor substitute for his lost shinigami powers and ability to see ghosts, and he judges now that it’s about time to let it go. It is halfway through December - nearly the Solstice. Only a few days longer until Winter begins.

Only a few days longer...

***

Through Spring, Ichigo carried Winter and he did not know it.

It took a bit longer to get warm in those days. His only-ever-human-now body began to ache, muscles taunt with a tension it was hard to shake unless he wore himself out. He eventually went to his dad about it, concerned by how it lingered. 

Isshin suggested the pains and chill may be his body adjusting to its lost abilities. He too, Isshin said, felt a bit weak and under the weather at first when he sacrificed his powers for Masaki.

Ichigo did not think that was necessarily it, but he had no one else to ask with Rukia back in Seireitei and so accepted his father’s assessment.

***

Through Summer, Ichigo carried Winter within him and he thought little of it.

Under the warmth of the summer months, Ichigo began to feel better than he had since the Winter War, began to breathe easier, began to gain color back to his skin. Isshin, Yuzu, and Karin all began to watch him less out of the corner of their eyes, exchanged fewer looks of concern when they thought he couldn’t see. He did not feel the summer half so intensely as everyone else, _but maybe,_ Ichigo thought, _this is just my new normal._

He rode out the summer feeling just a little bit off kilter, while within him Winter waited, a quietly slumbering sickness.

***

Through Fall, Ichigo carried Winter within him and he began to suspect it.

As the days shortened and the nights lengthened, the temperatures in Karakura began their slow trek downwards. The weather was comfortable, should have been comfortable, but Ichigo began to feel each loss of degree keenly. His new party trick became accurately guessing what the gauge outside would read as before Karin could check it.

A rise in temperatures meant minor relief from the increasingly present aches and chills. A drop meant a worsening. Ichigo’s thoughts flashed back to the months directly after the war and he began to wonder. It wasn’t until the first nosebleed that he truly worried, deep into October and on a day that otherwise was fine; certainly not cool enough for Ichigo’s nose to feel as dry as it was. It happened at school, because of course it did, but Ichigo honestly didn’t notice until a bright red drop landed on his notebook.

He stared blankly at it at first, confused until a second drop fell. Then he raised a hand to pinch his nose and another to signal the teacher. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said even as he was already getting up. He was halfway out the door before Hamada-sensei could really even protest, though he did make more of an effort than Ichigo was used to, calling out and following him to the door. Then again, Ichigo hadn’t had any reasons to skip out of classes this year. That was all Inoue, Chad, and Ishida, the only ones who still had their powers and could see and fight the hollows - and the three of them barely associated with Ichigo any longer, certainly not enough for the teacher to expect this kind of behavior from him too.

His teacher caught his elbow firmly, another surprise, and Ichigo whirled around and jerked out of his grip. To both their surprise, he stumbled in the execution of this movement.

“Kurosaki-kun, whe- oh.” Hamada-sensei cut himself off as he caught sight of the blood on Ichigo’s face. “Oh, I- I see. Very well then, Kurosaki-kun. My apologies. Go ahead. Perhaps stop by the nurse’s office on your way back, alright?” He patted - actually patted! - Ichigo’s arm and, with Ichigo’s gruff, “Okay,” turned and went back to his classroom.

“Huh,” Ichigo murmured, feeling weirdly touched and strangely off-kilter. “Thanks.”

He didn’t go by the nurse’s office in the end, because he was raised around a clinic and he knew how to handle a brief little nosebleed, but he did return to class out of appreciation for his teacher’s decency when all he really wanted to do was ditch and go take a warm bath. His friends - former friends? - weren’t there when he stepped back into the classroom and he was grateful for their absence even as he wondered if they left before or after his incident.

It never got brought up, so he honestly doesn’t know.

***

The nosebleeds continue to happen.

The aches ebb and flow - some days he wakes up feeling like he’s gone a couple rounds with Aizen again, or the Visored, or Kisuke. On those days, it’s a trial to drag himself out of bed.

He begins to struggle to find warmth. His baths are drawn hotter and hotter, he curls his hands around his tea the moment the steaming hot water is poured into the mug, he adds layers underneath all his clothes and he begins to seek out the kotatsu to nap under, though only when he knows his family won’t be around to see and grow concerned.

(More concerned.)

In the late Fall, Yuzu begins forcing health-oriented meals on all of them. Karin starts coming home earlier, and even Isshin takes to mumbling about flu shots and leaving vitamins on the table for him. Protection charms for health find themselves sewn onto his uniform, his bag, and his pajamas one morning.

It’s nice how they care, how they try to look after him and show their love, even if it’s rather stifling. But Ichigo looks in the mirror one morning, stiff and cold and tired, and he knows that he isn’t going to get better from their efforts. He exhales and realizes that he can see his own breath in a room that is perfectly temperate. Something is very wrong inside of him, something that no medicine will fix because it isn’t _sickness_ as humans know it.

Ichigo is ice cold. Under his skin, which is shades lighter than it once had been, Ichigo thinks he sees something. It looks like Death. It _feels_ like war, like one last powerful attack that took everything he had to give and more, like a gaping hole that sealed over in the span of a cracked-ice gasp.

***

Four days before the solstice, Ichigo carries Winter within him and knows it for exactly what it is.

It is a cruel guest, a horrible guest, lashing his insides with cold fire and frost, filling him up with the northern wind, and choking his life away day by hour by minute by second. It has been building itself up all year, nesting in Ichigo’s soul, and now that it is grown, its time come, it will destroy him on its way out.

Ichigo has not been cold lately. He knows that for what it is too.

***

_Do you regret it?_ he asks himself, breathing shallowly and walking slowly not to school, for which he is already late, but up to his mother’s grave. He wants to see her one last time, wants to tell her too what he will say to the others.

He thinks of the Grand Fisher, finally gone, and lays his offerings out with clumsy hands. “I don’t regret it,” he tells his mother honestly.

***

_Do you regret it?_ he asks himself, leaning heavily on the middle school’s gatepost as first Karin, then Yuzu notice him and run over.

Karin has club duties after school today, but she’d been crossing the courtyard with a teammate, their arms laden with sports supplies when she spotted him and made her excuses. The teammate only glances at Ichigo briefly before she is nodding along and taking Karin’s share, waving her off with a look of concern in Ichigo’s direction.

Yuzu is free of club duties today so it was only her Ichigo initially planned to walk home with, but he is happy enough to have both his sisters with him as they set out for home. Even if they insist on spending that time chastising him.

“Ichi-nii, what are you doing here?”

“Goat-Face told you to stay home, Ichi-nii!”

“You’re not well!”

“Come on, Yuzu, we need to get him home. You look like shit, Ichi-nii! What were you thinking?”

Ichigo smiles as the girls crowd in close to him, Yuzu clutching his hand with a worried frown, Karin scowling fiercely. He thinks of how they both know where to go if there is ever trouble they can’t handle, of how Isshin is a shinigami again and can protect them if a hollow ever gets past Chad, Ishida, and Inoue, thinks of how even Tatsuki, Mizuiro, and Keigo will look out for them when he is gone. “I don’t regret it.”

“What does that even- Arg! You sound like Goat-Face!”

***

_Do you regret it?_ he asks himself, staring at his hands. They’re stiff and pale and setting well into frostbite, though he hasn’t been let outside in two days. He won’t even make it to the one year anniversary of Aizen’s defeat.

Isshin’s own hands look large and warm next to them, and his father looks uncharacteristically serious as he takes Ichigo’s pulse and then presses down on one of Ichigo’s fingernails, releasing it and watching closely. Ichigo watches too. It takes several long seconds for the blanching to recede - not a good sign with capillary refills, if he remembers right.

“Ichigo…” Isshin says heavily. His father touches the frostbitten fingers gently, brows pulled together. He seems to be struggling for words.

_I wouldn’t have this,_ he knows, _if I hadn’t fought. If Aizen had won, I wouldn’t have had even this._

“I don’t regret it,” Ichigo says, flexing his fingers as best he can and shifting to slip a little further under the kotatsu. It doesn’t do much good - Ichigo can’t feel it at all - but Isshin insisted on it after a mandatory hour of family cuddling hadn’t yielded any improvement in Ichigo’s overall body temperature the night before. (He hadn’t stopped the mandatory cuddling, mind you, just added the kotatsu to it.) It was only the two of them now though, Karin and Yuzu forced out of the room for this final check up. His sisters had both been crying when they’d left to wash up and change for bed.

Isshin is silent for so long that Ichigo is almost asleep before his father speaks up, and even then it’s so low that Ichigo isn’t certain he heard correctly. “I do.”

A hand passes through his hair. Isshin takes a large breath. “Sit up, Ichigo. I need you to stay awake.”

“Why?” he asks, even as he struggles to do just that. Isshin shifts closer and pulls Ichigo to lean against his chest, as if he’s a child again. Honestly Ichigo feels a bit like a child right now.

“...Because I’m afraid you won’t wake up again if you do,” his father admits. He sounds scared. Ichigo tries to think of the last time his father sounded so scared.

“‘s going to happen eventually,” Ichigo says.

“No,” Isshin says back.

“It is.”

“No,” Isshin says again, with all that stubborn Shiba bullheadedness.

“Goat-Face,” is what Ichigo has to say to that, too tired to argue. They both know Ichigo is right anyway.

“Urahara called me back,” Isshin says. “He’ll be here soon.” He says it like it’ll stop anything. He says it like Kisuke Urahara has all the secrets to life and the universe and will apply every one of them to finding a cure for Ichigo. Maybe he does. Maybe he will.

It’s not a very nice thought though, Ichigo thinks, because it’ll be awful for poor Kisuke when he inevitably can’t cure him. Some things can’t be stopped. Winter is one of them. Death is another. And the solstice is so very close now, minutes away even. Ichigo can feel it.

“‘s fine,” Ichigo says. “I’m okay with it.”

“Good. Good.” Isshin wants to pretends he meant about Kisuke. Ichigo lets him.

He doesn’t really need to explain anything now. He got it all out in the letters, laid out neatly in little rows for each member of his family and each of his friends just upstairs in his desk drawer. Ichigo has known this was coming after all. He has long since accepted it, and long since prepared.

It is a shame... that it doesn’t look like he’ll get to see Kisuke again after all… At least not while alive.

“Hey, Goat-Face,” Ichigo asks, because he wants this last reassurance before the end, “do you think they’ll be waiting for me?”

“Who, Ichigo?” his father asks.

“Kaa-chan… And Zangetsu and Shiro. Will I be able to see them again?”

“Of course you will, Ichigo. You will. Just not _now_.”

“It’s fine,” Ichigo murmurs, half slurs really. “It’s fine. It’s fine.”

The more he says it the more distraught Isshin seems to get though, so Ichigo tries to think of something else to say. He wants for Shakespeare, but he can’t quite get all the words to come to him, and he loves the poet’s word too much to dishonor them with a poor rendition. So he slumps further into his father’s embrace and just closes his eyes to think about it a bit more, to try to get his sluggish mind to work.

He falls asleep in the thinking.

***

No matter how much Isshin shakes him, Ichigo doesn’t wake up again. By the time Kisuke gets there, falling to his knees beside them and hurrying out that, "Yoruichi-san has gone for Unohana-taichou," there is nothing to be done.

Ichigo’s soul does not linger after his death. He has no regrets.

Outside, the temperature drops sharply.

Winter begins.

**Author's Note:**

> I am a fan of stories where supernatural elements get in through doorways we unknowingly or even knowingly-under-duress open. Sometimes it works out. Sometimes it doesn't. In this instance it did not work out for Ichigo, but he has friends and family in Seireitei who'll look for him and it's hard to fear death so much when you know what the other side looks like. Also there is certain fatalism that comes with being the host of Winter.
> 
> This was intended to be for day 11 of whumptober, but I have no time during the week so. *jazz hands* The rest of my whumptober fics are unlikely to see the light of October, so I may as well post this one off schedule.
> 
> The Valente quote is taken from the poem "Skadi in the Forest of Legs" which, if we're being honest, is actually my Sansa Stark Poem™. But I think in this one instance I can apply it elsewhere.
> 
> I know Major Character Death isn't most people's jam, so thank you for reading!


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